Category Archives: Astrophysics

I remember very well my physics professor during my first year at university. She stressed the importance of having clear intuitions of what physical terms mean before any mathematics was invoked. ‘Imagine someone drops an 100-gram apple 1 metre above […] Read more

Astrophysicists from Yale University have recently claimed the discovery of a galaxy lacking dark matter . But, to fully understand (and assess) the excitement produced by this paper, let’s review a couple of things regarding dark matter and galaxies. In […] Read more

Author: Tomás Ruiz-Lara is a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias It is commonly said that Astronomy is an observational science. We cannot create and study stars or galaxies in our laboratories and, thus all the information we […] Read more

After all those big discoveries of the latest years (LIGO’s gravitational waves, or NASA’s TRAPPIST system, for example) I felt the need to explain how normal everyday astrophysics is dealt with. To explain the little things behind any discovery, and […] Read more

The direct search for dark matter has been a thriving experimental field since a couple of decades, and a new and promising experimental approach has been recently developed and tested: the use of an atomic clock inner mechanics. This whole […] Read more

We live in a violent universe. The energy scales involved in many astrophysical processes are enough to stamp out our planet, not to talk about life as we know it. But, somehow, we have been living so far in a […] Read more

Our universe is not stable according to the currently measured values of the top quark and Higgs particle masses. There is a non-null probability that at any instant in the next billions of years the present “false vacuum” will change […] Read more

Superconductors are a particularly strange kind of metal. What makes them different is their behavior at very low temperatures – extremely low, that is, close to absolute zero. Basic thermodynamics dictates that in this regime we should expect all motion […] Read more

Author: Miguel Santander-García holds a PhD in astrophysics (Universidad de La Laguna). After several years working as a support astronomer for the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes in La Palma, he is currently a postdoctorate fellow at the Observatorio Astronómico […] Read more

Let’s start with a thought experiment. We are looking up to a starry night sky. What if we turn off every star in our Galaxy? The heavens would become much darker, but some light sources would still be working. […] Read more